Friday, September 19, 2014

Learning
from Russia's Return to Its Historical Roots

By Janice
Shaw Crouse

Having swept all
before them in the aimless societies of the west, the LGBTIQ crowd is in a
howling fury with Russia’s pro-family movement for its refusal to capitulate to
their gay marriage agenda. They are calling for federal investigations of
Americans participating in what should have been a non-controversial
international pro-family celebration, honoring an institution that has been the
backbone of virtually all societies throughout thousands of years of history.
The International Family Forum, convening in Moscow on September 10 at the
State Kremlin Palace and continuing September 11 at the Cathedral of Christ the
Savior, drew more than 1,000 participants from around the world (including
about a dozen individuals from the United States).

Many Western
nations have kowtowed to the pressures of the LGBTIQ movement that seeks to
destroy freedom of speech, religious liberty, marriage and the family.
Emboldened by their political victories in the United States (more often than
not at the hands of unelected judges), the protesters made global headlines by trying
to shut down the World Congress of Families’ pro-family celebration in
Australia. They succeeded in preventing American organizations -- especially
the World Congress of Families -- from participating in the just-completed
International Family Forum in Moscow; they threw up barriers and threatened
retribution, but they could not shut down either the Australian or the Russian
events. The most they could do was demand there be investigations of the
American individuals who helped plan the Russian conference, but they could not
stop free citizens from participating on their own.

The Russian
forum in its “General Concept” preface succinctly identified the harms caused
by the “sensate culture” (a term from Pitirim Sorokin, a famous Russian
sociologist who knew well the deleterious effects of a man-centered, atheistic
worldview), a modern-day post-Christian dimension in world history: “the
destruction of moral standards such as Goodness, Truth, and Beauty and
destruction of faith in a Created natural order that distinguishes good from
evil.” Such attitudes -- “this modern-day ambiguity, relativity, and
indeterminacy regarding family” -- “creates the threat to the civilized
existence of societies.” The Russians declare that “it is high time to talk not
only about the role of the family institution in the retention of humanity as a
biological species but also about the vital role of [the] natural family in the
preservation of civilized society and “ordered liberty.” This
transformation is “crucially important especially given the millennial battle
between civil society and barbarism, where the latter appears in a highly
technological and disguised progressive form contributing to the increasing
moral chaos.”

The Russians,
having experienced 70 years of the horrors and “moral chaos” brought about by
the Marxist-Leninist experiment at creating the "New Man," are not
about to give up their hard-won grip on reality, regained by going back to
their historic Orthodox roots. Their clear unswerving vision of their recent
past under Communism enables them to see progressivism as “a new tool of
secular, post-modern humanists and sexual radicals to pursue not only their
economic interests, but also, ideological, philosophical and political
interests.” Russian pro-family leaders recognize that the threats to “the
meaning of family in the context of global ideological competition from
self-interested post-modern humanists and challenges to the ensure the survival
and sovereignty of modern states grows to such an extent that the protection of
the classical notions of normative behavior, civilized man, the human family,
and definition of marriage have to be enshrined in national constitutions.”
Whatever critiques of Putin’s foreign policy you may have, the pro-family
movement in Russia is a genuine and deep phenomenon, unrelated to foreign
affairs.

Intellectual dry
rot has made western intellectuals susceptible to every foolish fad --
neo-Marxism, feminism, genderism, humanism, environmentalism, etc. -- that has
resulted from deconstructionism. Nowhere is this more evident than their
inability to discern simple biological realities such as the difference between
male and female. As the Russians noted, “Only precise and univalent definitions
may permit us to understand that behind the fuzzy expectations of modern
humanism and its jargon, there hides traits of degradation and deception that
would lead to the death of humanity.” Such thinking, of course, is scorned by
the elites who have produced our distorted Western intellectual condition.

Having chosen
the mush of moral relativism and multiculturalism over the sterner more
rigorous and demanding Judeo-Christian worldview, the leaders in the great
universities, the media with the vast array of communications technology at its
disposal, the business and government leaders of the western world from
Washington to London to Paris to Frankfurt to Vienna, all have been easily
swayed and finally subjugated by first one movement and then another ––
including feminism's flimsy claims that men and women are interchangeable, the
LGBTIQ's claims that gender is a social construct and thus we must give up
everything from traditional/real-world designation of male and female bathrooms
to father and mother on birth certificates.

We in the west
have read a bit of Russian history, but know little of what is embedded in the
DNA of the Russians from the first-hand experiences of generation after
generation of those who struggled to survive one tragedy after another.
Napoleon’s half a million strong army was able to reach Moscow but was turned
back in defeat by the realities of the flames that consumed the city and the
deadly cold of the Russian winter. Hitler learned nothing from Napoleon's
folly. He had no comprehension of how tenaciously the Russians would defend
their Motherland no matter how many millions of them he managed to kill with
advanced German weaponry.

Now come Obama,
Kerry, Clinton and the rest of the LGBTIQ's claque who bluster, sanction, and
slander pro-family Russian leaders; these, however, are persons who see and
understand the real threat to their homeland of the depopulation and
demographic winter that follow when there is a failure of natural families to
flourish. Now come the Human Rights Campaign and those who demonize and demagogue
anyone who dares to speak Truth to power on these fundamental issues.

Meanwhile, the
radical Islamist jihadist have taken the measure of the decadent West with its
vast technological superiority (but moral and spiritual bankruptcy) and have
decided they can with beat us with suicide bombers. And as long as we are led
by thinkers who not only fail to recognize the importance of (but actively
fight against) something as elementary and fundamental as the necessity to a
society of having the foundational strength of families lead by a mothers and
fathers, then perhaps the jihadist are right.

What western
elites refuse to comprehend, the Russian cab driver taking us to the airport
effortlessly grasps, (from practical, real-life experience), namely the importance
of family and fidelity. We conversed even though his English was a faltering,
rusty, classroom level of vocabulary. In response to my question about family,
he told us that he had two children – a boy 21 and a girl 3 years old. Then,
apparently in recognition that we were Americans, he wanted to make it very
clear that he was married, had had only one wife -- had loved only one woman --
even though he “made” his son when he was only a lad of 17. Family was
obviously very important to him as a man and he wanted it clearly understood
that he was faithful to his vows to his wife.

Today, after 80
years of the horrors of life under communism, Russia is working to restore
family and Orthodoxy as the foundations of its culture and the means of its
survival as a nation. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how much stomach the
west has left for a fight for survival. Perhaps we will simply, once again,
capitulate to Jihadism just as we have to LGBTIQism and so many other hollow
“isms.” But if after witnessing the miracle of Russia's unblinking repudiation
of the blight and sorrows of its own Marxist experiment, I wouldn't bet on the
Russians capitulating to western LGBTIQ fascists without a fight.

Janice
Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., was
winner of the 2013 Global Leadership Award by the Leadership Institute and The
World Congress of Families. She was one of about a dozen American participants
in the International Family Forum in Moscow, September 10-11, 2014.